Quotes about chasm (66 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Appearance

“The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

“All round me are words, and words and words, They grow on me like leaves, they never Seem to stop their slow growing From within… But I tell my self, words Are a nuisance, beware of them, they Can be so many things, a Chasm where running feet must pause, to Look, a sea with paralyzing waves, A blast of burning air or, A knife most willing to cut your best Friend's throat… Words are a nuisance, but. They grow on me like leaves on a tree, They never seem to stop their coming, From a silence, somewhere deep within…”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Kamala Suraiyya Das (Summer in Calcutta)

Tree , Silence , Sea

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths, — all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act II, sc. iv
Wallenstein (1798), Part I - Die Piccolomini (The Piccolomini)

Faith , Religion , Beauty , Mountain

“Well then, I will tell you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him. I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than a man. I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me but to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence of my looks, my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts. Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; He will have it entirely to Himself. He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith His demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, experience that remarkable, supernatural love toward Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man's creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it, which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

In a statement about Jesus Christ. While exiled on the rock of St. Helena, Napoleon called Count Montholon to his side and asked him, "Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?" Upon the Count declining to respond Napoleon countered. Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods http://books.google.com/books?id=jSI9HnMHdPsC&pg=PA149&lpg=PA149&dq=napoleon+jesus+among+gods&source=bl&ots=CdsDSjamnm&sig=K3l7Ek972r7pyEFT681lbf3PVSQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nBqhUf3RL4au9AS37ICwCQ&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA, p. 149, in Henry Parry Liddon (1868) The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; Eight Lectures. New edition. https://books.google.com/books?id=IcINAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA148&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false pp. 147-148, and in Henry Parry Liddon (1869) The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; Eight Lectures. Fourth edition. https://ia800203.us.archive.org/15/items/divinityofourlord00libbrich/divinityofourlord00libbrich.pdf pp. 147-148.
Attributed

Love , Men , Children , Soul

“For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Life , Women , Men , People

“May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, Hypnos (1922)
Context: May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned frensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was — my only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!

Death , God , Peace , Sleep

“The bridge fell away into the chasm, and the Cyclops howled… with delight, because he was standing right next to us.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

“How…” Dalinar said. “You fell into a chasm!”
“I fell face-first, sir,” Kaladin said, “and fortunately, I’m particularly hard-headed.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

“A man who lifts his chin in pride will fail to see the chasm at his feet.”

Alison Goodman (1966) Australian science-fiction writer

Source: Eona: The Last Dragoneye

“Passionately obsessed by anything we love--an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels, rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love….”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Love , Fear , Way , Passion

“The society killed Kendra."
…
Don't mention it to Verl. He might dive into a chasm.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

“It was growing late, and though one might stand on the brink of a deep chasm of disaster, one was still obliged to dress for dinner.”

Georgette Heyer book April Lady

Source: April Lady

“A bit of advice
Given to a young Native American
At the time of his initiation:
As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Life , Way , Thinking , Time

“Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Heart

“All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, wile calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Part II, Chapter 8
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life , Feeling , Time

“The chasm between what central planning and liberal society brought us, should be the most studied phenomenon of our times. One looks in vain for such study in our research, textbooks, schools, and universities.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

School , Study , Universe , Time

““Is there anyone in Chasm City she hasn’t deceived?”
“Possibly, somewhere, but only as an extreme theoretical possibility.””

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 29 (p. 481).

“There is nothing more dangerous than to leap a chasm in two jumps.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted in Design for Power : The Struggle for the World (1941) by Frederick Lewis Schuman, p. 200; This is the earliest citation yet found for this or similar statements which have been attributed to David Lloyd George, as well as to Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Vaclav Havel, Jeffrey Sachs, Rashi Fein, Walter Bagehot and Philip Noel-Baker. It has been described as a Greek, African, Chinese, Russian and American proverb, and as "an old Chassidic injunction". Variants:
Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps.
Later life

“The greater the political progress made by the Hindus, the greater, in my judgement, will be the Moslem discontent and antagonism. All the conferences in the world cannot bridge over the unbridgeable, and between those two countries lies a chasm which cannot be crossed by the resources of modern political engineering.”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Statement of 1925, as quoted in Lord Reading (1967) by H. Montgomery Hyde, p. 387.

World , Country

“The time for the healing of the wounds has come.
The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come.
The time to build is upon us.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Inaugural celebration address (1994)

Time

“All the difference in the world are as nothing compared to this: the difference between being you and being me. It makes the chasms between gods and men, between men and women, between dead and alive, seem almost trivial.You are you. She is someone else. Between lie the stars.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 14

Women , Men , God , Lie

“[There is an] unbridgeable chasm in the world. On one side are such criminal gangs, sanctified by the term government, and the United Nations they dominate, enforcing by their guns mass slavery, mass death, mass violence, mass impoverishment, and mass famine. On the other side are democratic countries where people are free, secure, and need not fear mass impoverishment, murder at the hands of government agents, and killing famines.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 12

Death , People , World , Fear

“When the dark and vengeful spirit of slavery, always ambitious, preferring to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, fired the southern heart and stirred all the malign elements of discord, when our great republic, the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world, had reached the point of supreme peril, when the Union of these states was torn and rent asunder at the center, and the armies of a gigantic rebellion came forth with broad blades and bloody hands to destroy the very foundations of American society, the unknown braves who flung themselves into the yawning chasm, where cannon roared and bullets whistled, fought and fell.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

They died for their country.
1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

World , Hope , Hell , Freedom

“All the time each one of us is hovering above an unfathomable abyss of potential calamities of every kind - sensed in that ever-throbbing pulse deep down in one's heart; as long as this chasm does not open up to devour one, the floating island in any guise whatever must surely be welcome. Wrong notion of God? Asiatic pessimism?”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God , Sense , Time , Heart

“The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 13; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 52

Question , Science , Personality

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or difused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

Isaiah Berlin book The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Editor Henry Hardy. Collaborator Michael Ignatieff. Editorial Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 1400846633, p. 2.

Way , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“Magic isn't real. There has to be a logical reason explanation for the effect of Ivory Tower achievement on Real World success. And here it is: despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity. The labor market doesn't pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays for preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them.”

Bryan Caplan (1971) American political scientist

[The Case against Education, 13, https://books.google.com/books?id=Mws8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA13]
The Case against Education (2018)

World , Strong , Learning , Success

“He who comes knows only his coming,
He who goes knows only his end.
To be saved from the chasm,
Why cling to the cliff?
Clouds floating low
Never know where the breezes will blow them.”

Sengai (1750–1837) Japanese artist

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 16 – Page numbers as per the 1996 Penguin Classics Edition)

Life , Way

“Now, as an embittered cynic, I should be almost programmed to vomit all over the screen at the mere sight of this, but instead, I find it strangely moving. You see, as I stare into their happy smiling faces filled with naive joie de vivre, I know they're just blissfully unaware of the crushing despair that awaits them as they venture further into adulthood. The myriad disappointments, the yawning chasms of pain, the slow gnawing descent into physical decay, the sheer unrelenting horror of it all.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Screenwipe S4E4
Discussing the High School Musical series
Screenwipe

Pain , Smile , Disappointment , Adulthood

“In finance as in life, there is often a huge chasm between what is expected and what actually transpires.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 2, Measuring The Beast, p. 71.

Life

“Those of us from Chasm started calling it the Visitor because that's a relatively comfortable label. It implies the stay is temporary, that the thing will go away. We think the Visitor must be part of a race of beings who live in space, though we're guessing at that. We also postulate that they hitch rides on bits of space trash that are moving somewhere, like the huge one that came at us. Anyhow, the Visitor is getting closer by the day.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Wolf in Ch. 37 : leaving bastion (p. 353)
The Visitor (2002)

Thinking , Parting

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Wallenstein, part i. Act ii, scene 4 (translated from Schiller)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Faith , Religion , Beauty , Mountain

“The masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has so long divided them.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

Acceptance of Liberal Republican nomination as President (29 May 1872)
1870s

“Something must be done, and that speedily, to bridge the widening chasm between the Executive and the Congress. Our experience with President Wilson has demonstrated this. As a self-centered autocrat, confident of himself and suspicious of others, hostile to advice or discussion, he became the absolute master of the Congress while his party was in the majority. The Congress, instead of being a co-ordinate branch, was really in session only to accept, adopt and put into laws the imperious will of the president. When, however, the majority changed, there being no confidence between the executive and the legislative branch of the government, the necessary procedure was almost paralyzed. The president was unyielding and the Congress insisted upon the recognition of its constitutional rights. Even if the president is, as McKinley was, in close and frequent touch with the Senate and the House of Representatives, the relation is temporary and unequal, and not what it out to be, automatic. Happily we have started a budget system; but the Cabinet should have seats on the floor of the Houses, and authority to answer questions and participate in debates.”

Chauncey Depew (1834–1928) American politician

My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 189

Hostility , Law , Confidence , Question

“he liked lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political instinct, with out waiting further experiment — as he took for granted that arsenic poisoned — the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life , Waiting

“When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The Weight of Glory (1949)

God , Pain , Secret , World

“It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Italy under the Oligarchy
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life , God , War , World

“Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood’s motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 18 (pp. 255-256)

Way

“This is my prayer for all of us—"Lord, increase our faith." Increase our faith to bridge the chasms of uncertainty and doubt…. Grant us faith to look beyond the problems of the moment to the miracles of the future…. Give us faith to do what is right and let the consequence follow.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Lord, Increase Our Faith, Ensign, Nov. 1987, 52–53.

Faith , Problem , Future

“I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all. I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is under way, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed. I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs. The key lies in nutrition—specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts.”

Caldwell Esselstyn (1933) American physician, author and rower

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease https://books.google.it/books?id=WDjZpJXEQwkC&pg=PT0 (New York: Penguin, 2007), ch. 1.

People , Health , Disease , Way

“It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Wakefield

"Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

“After September 11th I had tons of interviews everywhere, except the United States of course, and often it was national radio and TV. A couple of times it turned out to be Irish television and BBC back to back, and the difference in reaction was startling. If I said this much on Irish TV, OK, discussion over, everyone understands what I'm talking about. You try to say it on BBC, you have to go on for like about an hour to explain to them what you mean. The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who's been holding the whip for 800 years and who's been under it for 800 years.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

In Noam Chomsky - Rebel Without a Pause, 2003 http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/1614027.php
Quotes 2000s, 2003

Understanding , Time , Dependency , Sea

“Cognitivism bridges the chasm between what the writer C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures" — the widening gap between the world view of the scientist and the humanist. The Caltech philosopher W. T. Jones has called this the crisis of contemporary culture.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

New Mindset on Consciousness (1987)

World

“"Do not die that we may not die," the dead cry out within you. "We had no time to enjoy the women we desired; be in time, sleep with them! We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds; turn them into deeds! We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope; make it firm!" …
But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the earth.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Women , Hope , Sleep , Light

“Nothing can prepare you for the yawning chasm of time that passes in Canada before the healthcare system actually does any healthcare.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Sunday Times August 30, 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/article6814702.ece

Time

“First, please note that we are not focusing here on target-market characterization. The place most crossing-the-chasm marketing segmentation efforts get into trouble is at the beginning, when they focus on a target market or target segment instead of on a target customer.”

Geoffrey Moore book Crossing the Chasm

Source: Crossing the Chasm, 1991, p. 68

Effort

“In that strange island Iceland,—burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;—where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Beauty , Literature , Memory , Sea

“The most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, Nobel lecture (2002)

People , Problem , Universe , Time

“When a miner looks at the rope that is to lower him into the deep mine, he may coolly say, "I have faith in that rope as well made and strong." But when he lays hold of it, and swings down by it into the tremendous chasm, then he is believing on the rope. Then he is trusting himself to the rope. It is not a mere opinion — it is an act. The miner lets go of every thing else, and bears his whole weight on those well braided strands of hemp. Now that is faith.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 225.

Faith , Strong

“An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

Home

“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

Lovers

“There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Substance, Pressure, Beyond, Pulse in Matter, p. 210
Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose (2007)

“A good sermon is an engineering operation by which a chasm is bridged so that the spiritual goods on one side — the "unsearchable riches of Christ" — are actually transported into personal lives upon the other. Here lies the difference between a sermon and a lecture.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American pastor

The Living of These Days (1956)

Christ , Personality

“I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Though "the Bard" is often reference to William Shakespeare, Fuller here probably uses the term in a generic sense, and in tribute to the poet-philosopher she considered in some ways her mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who may have made such a statement, which she elsewhere quotes as "I have witnessed many a shipwreck, yet still beat noble hearts".
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Context: I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed. Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny have been broken; those I still have with me show defects in this broad light. Yet enough is left, even by experience, to point distinctly to the glories of that destiny; faint, but not to be mistaken streaks of the future day. I can say with the bard,
"Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts."
Always the soul says to us all, Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action. Such shall be the effectual fervent means to their fulfilment.

Life

“One thing shines clear in the heart's sweet reason,
One lightning over the chasm runs —
That to turn from love is the world's one treason
That darkens all the suns.”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

Source: The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913), The Crowning Hour, II
Context: p>If this is a dream, then perhaps our dreaming
Can touch life's height to a finer fire:
Who knows but the heavens and all their seeming
Were made by the heart's desire?One thing shines clear in the heart's sweet reason,
One lightning over the chasm runs —
That to turn from love is the world's one treason
That darkens all the suns.</p

Love , World , Sun , Heart

“Where there used to be a chasm and irreconcilable conflict between the scientific and the traditional humanistic views of man and the world, we now perceive a continuum. A unifying new interpretative framework emerges with far reaching impact not only for science but for those ultimate value-belief guidelines by which mankind has tried to live and find meaning.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Nobel lecture (1981)
Context: The former scope of science, its limitations, world perspectives, views of human nature, and its societal role as an intellectual, cultural and moral force all undergo profound change. Where there used to be a chasm and irreconcilable conflict between the scientific and the traditional humanistic views of man and the world, we now perceive a continuum. A unifying new interpretative framework emerges with far reaching impact not only for science but for those ultimate value-belief guidelines by which mankind has tried to live and find meaning.

World , Science

“As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: "You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?"
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him.

Time

“President Reagan knew that he would not get behavior change from the Soviet regime unless he seemed serious about changing it. The actual change was a happy byproduct, which spelled the end of the Marxist mystique. East-European youth backpacked their way to the West to tell fellow students about the wide chasm between the deceptive promise of Marxism and its wretched reality. Long lines to take Marxist courses disappeared in Universities, from Buenos Aires to Paris. Similarly, I am convinced once the people bring down the clerical regime, with Iranian journalists, intellectuals and students free to travel, they will have the same shattering impact on the appeal of Islamist theocracy throughout the Moslem world.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

Iran, Regime Change or Behavior Change: A false choice http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=104&page=5, Hudson Institute, Apr. 3, 2007.
Speeches, 2007

People , Youth , World , Way